Anti-Police Police Statists

Jim Holt, aka the Gateway Pundit, notes an odd use of the term "activist" by the news media. In a story given the headline, "Activists Visit Judge's Neighborhood", by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Holt summarizes and interprets the story as follows:

1. Leaving letters full of demands at the door of a Judge’s home is not a threat.
2. Knocking on the door of all of her neighbors is not a shakedown.
3. Demanding a special prosecutor after Wilson has been cleared of wrongdoing is not double jeopardy.

Let me add my own further observation. These thugs are behaving just like the kind of authoritarian regimes they pretend we have in the United States, and that actually exist elsewhere in the world. Unannounced visits, the enlistment of neighbors and friends as "informants", and arbitrary demands are just as wrong when implemented by an anarchic mob as they are when implemented by the state.

And not only do the actions of these bullies remind me of a police state, they and their slavish coverage by the Post-Dispatch remind me of the following, from a synopsis of the end of the Weimar Republic in The Ominous Parallels, by Leonard Peikoff:

The civility cherished by the civilized men had finally been defeated by their ideas, although they did not know that this was the cause. After years of preaching contradictions and of evading principles with an anti-ideological shrug, these men were astonished to see the nation conclude that man cannot live by principles, that reason is no guide to action, and that anything goes. After years of institutionalizing interest-group warfare, which they had justified as sacrifice or collective service, these men were astonished to see hostile gangs take to the streets and demand one another's sacrifice. After years of undercutting the mind by preaching the primacy of gentle feeling (whether "progressive" or religious or skeptical), these men were astonished to find that irrational feeling is no counter to "wild emotionalism." (p. 227)

The Ferguson protests would have fizzled out long ago were it not for a big assist by a sympathetic media, but bias has to come from somewhere, as Peikoff shows in his aptly-titled book.

-- CAV